The Virginia Citizen is not privy to the FOIA documents we just received and just because Trump won, we can not relax as we must get transparency at the state and local level.

Can I make a statement?

NEVER DEPEND ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO FIX ANYTHING LOCALLY!

Trump Admin could freeze refugee resettlement until the next presidential election or end up in court.

UPDATE:

On November 17th I picked up a large box of documents from my FOIA request (freedom of information act) from the Office of Newcomer Services downtown Richmond.

These were available to me in hard copy only. I must say, they responded fast and were very proactive on my request, and nice as can be!

But to make these available to all Virginians, have to get the thousands of pages into the digital and searchable world.

So, for the last week, my resources have been going through the cumbersome and time consuming scanning process which is using the correct software to produce searchable documents in a PDF with OCR (Optical Character Recognition technology). This allows citizens, legislators and others to search the entire FIOA by keyword. Plus you have dozens and more stapled docs which have to be unstapled, examined, settings adjusted, scanned and then re-staple the documents. This is a truly laborious process

My hope is to share this publicly to all Virginians and allow the grassroots to have true transparency and see how the inner workings look like between the refugee resettlement contract, the state of Virginia and the federal office of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

I have looked to see if anything like this has been done in other states and haven't seen it, but could well have been done.

This is also the reason you have not received a newsletter in many days as the presidential election and other priorities, such as this research, has devoured the time.